Bodies in water. Wild swimming spots from around the world - the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, Hampstead Heath ponds, waterfalls in Croatia, a nudist beach on the Yuba River. People interacting with each other and with nature, participating in leisure.

The images are produced robotically, fusing hundreds of individual photographs into prints up to 1.5 by 3 metres. A motorised head scans the scene like a mosaic, later algorithmically stitched together. Sometimes I mimic the robot's movements myself - a way to keep one foot in the experience while still producing something. The viewpoint is neither human nor conventionally photographic. Hung to fill your field of vision, the prints can't be taken in at once. You move around them like a landscape.

These were the only photographic images I could make during this period. As I studied and taught photography, my ability to engage with the medium became increasingly difficult. The robotic process was all I could manage - a way of seeing that kept me at a distance from both the subject and from photography itself. I became alienated from my own medium.

I love these experiences. Some of the best places I've swum I haven't photographed because I didn't want to break the moment. But I kept photographing anyway, sometimes out of compulsion, sometimes guilt. The same impulse I judge in Instagram culture - the need to capture every significant experience - just bigger. The size of a wall instead of a phone screen.

Made across 2012-2018, the work charts the period when Instagram went from niche to ubiquitous and phones became cameras. I was thinking about what happens when the real fades in significance and we willingly retreat into mediation. But I wasn't outside this process, looking in. I was inside it - a photographer alienated from his own medium, turning something magical and messy into neat, pretty packages. The scale and detail felt less like immersion than compensation. When I look at these images now I feel something close to disgust at myself.

Human pleasure drives us into even the most wild places. Nothing is safe. Nowhere is pure. No experience should remain undocumented, unshared. All the world an image.

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